Pedro Pietri

Pedro Pietri (21 March 1944-3 March 2004) was a Puerto Rican-American nationalist poet and a leader of the "Nuyorican movement" in New York City.

Biography
Pedro Pietri was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico on 21 March 1944, and his family moved to New York City, New York when he was just three years old. Pietri witnessed discrimination while he was growing up, and he started to write poems while he was in high school. Pietri was drafted into the US Army during the Vietnam War, and he affiliated himself with the socialist Young Lords movement. He helped to found the "Nuyorican Movement" of poetry with several other Puerto Rican poets, and he was known for his unconventional style; he dressed in black and was irreverent toward religion while claiming to be a reverend, threw condoms at his audiences on occasion, and wrote a poem consisting entirely of punctuation marks. Pietri was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2003, and he died in New York City on 3 March 2004 at the age of 59.